For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace

by Michael Gillard

  The DPS officers made it clear that he could resign straight away because they had the authority to accept it. But Page declined and they left.

  £ £ £

  Within minutes of the DPS leaving his house, Page lit up a bonfire of the insanities of his cop hedge fund. He had already burnt some paperwork back in April when he was first tipped off that he was being looked at. He now wanted to get rid of other contracts that would betray those police colleagues who hadn’t taken him to the civil court or put charges on his house and the barns. Most of these were Buckingham Palace boys, some of who had made their money and moved on.

  ‘[I] burnt a lot when I got the touch from the DPS. The only thing I had left was the ledgers, which no one could make that much of. I could have said I made them up [if questioned about it],’ Page told me.

  During the bonfire he had to run back into the house and put on a riot helmet because among the household rubbish were a few aerosol canisters. Had the DPS set up an observation post overlooking the house, it would have been a comical and incriminating video to later show a jury. As it was, no one was watching or listening in.

  It fell to Mubasher Hussain to secretly record a phone call Page made to him within days of the Osman warning. Hussain, who was brought in to the scheme by Paresh Solanki, had invested £133,500 by this stage. Page was half cut when he called and keen to leave as little as possible for the DPS to find.

  ‘I’ve got fucking internal affairs looking at me. Have you been told?’ Page enquired.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right, you need to get hold of Paresh, tell him if they try and contact him he’s gonna have to keep his mouth shut or otherwise they’re gonna go through his records, my records and anyone else’s with a fine tooth comb, yeah? … Now basically they are looking at ULPD where you and everyone else has put money in … So contact anybody that you know who did and explain to them we are close to getting out the money and I am not gonna have this fucked up by these wankers who are investigating me on that, right? And tell them if they get any contact they don’t wanna say nothing.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t want to be telling them that you’ve been taking money off me last year or the year before, because they are gonna fucking bubble cunts up to the taxman.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ve got some news for you with regards to some funds before Christmas, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘… which I’m gonna discuss with you on a different number. This number I’m gonna get rid of it today. I’ll speak to you later on this evening on the new number. Don’t say nothing to [Abishake Gill] at all about it. Fuck him. Alright?’

  ‘I’m just deleting all of his calls to be honest,’ Hussain told Page.

  ‘Yeah, just leave him. I’m dealing with him. He’s alright.’

  ‘What are [the DPS] looking into?’

  ‘They are looking into ULPD and all the rest of it because I’m Old Bill. They’re seeing if there’s any fraud and all that pap. But Bee [Bimal Lodhia] needs to be capped and Paresh urgently.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You need to keep a lid on it all, right, otherwise we are totally, totally fucked.’

  ‘Okay.’

  £ £ £

  Four days after the Osman warning, Page was wracking his beer-addled brain for clues to who would want him kidnapped or even dead. ‘I knew that the amount of people I was involved with in the police service, the different departments they were in, there was some heavy people, some serious people involved with the various forces,’ he told me.

  Another suspect was Rahul Sharma, who had actually made an ostensible death threat weeks earlier. Then there were the apparent threats to Lodhia from Russian and Turkish heavies.

  Another possibility he considered was that the Osman had something to do with what Anjam Khan had recently told him: According to Page, Khan had invested £20,000 from some Essex gangsters via a mutual contact. Page collected the money and had used it to pay back some of what he owed Surinder Mudhar, without him knowing its provenance. This was the brown envelope delivered to St James’s Palace the night Cherie Blair and one of the Princes were attending a function.

  Meanwhile, the story goes that the gangsters had apparently tired of waiting for a return and left an intimidating message for Khan, who played it to Page and also informed Baree.

  Sitting in his house, looking through the window for suspicious activity, Page discounted that Khan or anyone from the BAT circle could be behind the threats that led to the Osman warning.

  But the DPS, on the other hand, had intelligence naming Anjam Khan as a possible ‘suspect’ talking about the kidnap plot. What remained unknown was how the DPS came to this view.64

  Chapter 17

  Royal hunt of the Sun

  Tuesday, 21 November: As Page cracked open his first can of Stella of the day, Laura flicked him a withering stare then left to take the boys to school.

  The Belgian lager is generally not regarded as a breakfast beer. It tends to ruin the day’s best-laid plans. But since the Osman warning, Page’s life had gone into free-fall. His mind was now completely frazzled by the inescapable pressure of what he’d done with over three million pounds of other people’s money. There had been little sleep in the last five days. An hour here and there when the alcohol eventually took hold. Otherwise, Page was buzzing with fear and adrenalin. The Kalms herbal tablets were not taking the edge off his pain because he was necking so many.

  He still believed salvation was around the corner with his next bets on the financial markets, or maybe Arsenal to beat Chelsea. He was also banking on Abishake Gill, the Heathrow baggage handler, to come through with some, any, funds. But Laura knew her husband’s knack for making money had been slipping away with every gulp of lager.

  She was going to have her hair done after dropping off the boys. A friend had called to say her hairdresser was making a home visit and did she want to come over. Page’s aunt, who was looking after two-year-old Harry, gave Laura £10 for the hairdresser. ‘Well, if I’m going to die, I don’t want my hair to look a mess!’ she told her gratefully.

  Aunty Pat had every reason to turn her back on Page. She had lost the family house after it was sold to finance her nephew’s gambling, and was now living in a small flat with an uncertain future and bad health.

  However, when Page told her about the Osman she came straight over to help with the boys. His aunt was worried about what she saw. Her nephew was in a desperate state; sitting on the couch in a depression so deep she thought he would kill himself. ‘He was so desperate that any money he could scrape together he was putting into trying to make more and thinking the next bet would be the one,’ she recalled.

  Page still believed any threat to life was coming from police officers in the syndicate, not gangsters; otherwise he would never have let Laura take the kids to school. He believed police investors could shoot or plant drugs on him but never his wife and kids. Only cunts did that. They were still coppers after all. His reasoning was informed by his own involvement in the plot to beat up the Jimmy’s officer over the Hearts pyramid scheme

  By late morning, Page was pissed and sitting by the window surveying the cul-de-sac. He spotted a man parked oddly in a side road across the way. There was nothing covert about the car’s location. The man inside it was in his late twenties with short hair. It looked like he was constantly on the phone and looking at the house. But Page’s special window blinds meant no one could see in.

  Page suspected he might be under some sort of DPS surveillance. A nearby house would offer a perfect observation post, he thought, but surely the anti-corruption squad would not be this conspicuous, unless they were there for his safety.

  Aunty Pat was at the back of the house playing with Harry oblivious to how wound up her nephew was becoming. He paced around the sitting room like a cage fighter waiting for the bell to ring. ‘The cunt is not getting away with this,’ he mumbled to himself.

/>   Page had hidden a small black plastic case under the sofa in the living room. Inside was a silver imitation gas-powered Berretta handgun, which he discreetly retrieved and put into the pocket of his Tommy Hilfiger jacket worn over a bulletproof vest.

  ‘There’s someone outside. I’m going to have a gander,’ he shouted to his aunt. Coolly putting on some wrap-around shades, Page picked up the keys to her Escort estate parked on the drive, left the house and locked the front door behind him.

  As he turned to open the car, Page saw the man parked across the road partially emerge and level a long lens at him. It was all over in seconds. The man was now back in his car and sped away when he saw Page get into the Escort. The driver turned left into Gilbert Road, flying over the speed bumps outside the school where Page’s children were sitting in class. He didn’t know if he was being followed so he ran the next red light to check. Page went with him.

  As the cars approached Sainsbury’s, Page dialled 999 and left the phone on the passenger seat. On Pilgrim’s Lane, the policeman was level and screamed at him: ‘Get out the car! Police.’ The driver gestured back as if to say, ‘What? What?’ He stopped briefly and Page rammed into him. But the driver slammed his car into reverse and sped off in the same direction they had just come. He didn’t know where he was going but had decided to get to somewhere public, so he followed the signs for Lakeside Shopping Centre.

  Page performed a J-turn and for a split second enjoyed how it must have looked. By now the other car was some 100 metres away. When Page caught up he thought the driver was on the phone and wondered if he was calling for back up. His own mobile was on the floor, which he managed to retrieve and redial 999.

  ‘I’m heading for Lakeside shopping complex,’ he shouted into the phone.

  Both cars arrived at the next roundabout at great speed, with Page beeping furiously. Council gardeners on the roundabout island looked up as the chase passed them twice. The driver thought if he kept going round then Page would get bored and pull away. But he didn’t. Like a cop show, Page pulled in front of the other car ramming into it. He jumped out holding the Berretta and rushed the driver, pulling him out of the car.

  ‘Police! Fucking stand still, you cunt!’ Page barked in that convincing cop way as he held the man down and looked inside the car for evidence of a weapon. There wasn’t one just a Canon camera with a huge lens.

  By this time traffic on the roundabout had come to a halt. Page dragged the man to his feet and frogmarched him to the island with the gun still to his head.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he shouted. The man offered no resistance, just pleaded not to die.

  ‘Is this a fucking brown envelope job to come sort me out?’

  ‘Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! I’m a photographer for the Sun.’

  Scott Hornby had been sent by the tabloid to snatch a shot of Page after a tip-off from officers at Jimmy’s about the collapsed syndicate.

  Page started to ease the gun away and put the pieces together: the camera and the fear in his eyes suggested twenty-eight-year-old Hornby was telling the truth.

  Two of the gardeners who had been watching ringside decided to approach.

  ‘Call the fucking police,’ shouted Page.

  ‘Well put the gun down,’ said one of the gardeners.

  Page, still holding the gun to Hornby’s head, said, ‘I’m old Bill’.

  ‘Show us some ID.’

  ‘I don’t have any,’ Page replied. He felt one of the gardeners was a have-a-go-hero about to attack him with a rake so he put the gun on the floor.

  With the sound of police sirens approaching and Page still restraining the photographer, his eight-year free-fall from trusted, Royal Protection officer at Buckingham Palace to half-cut, gun-toting crazy was at an end.

  ‘It was like one of those Hamlet moments when you are sitting in the back of the police car with cuffs on and the music is playing and you are thinking, “How much more shitty can my life get? A fucking Sun camera!”’

  Laura, meanwhile, had returned home with her hair done to find the front door locked. Aunty Pat let her in through the back.

  ‘Where’s Paul?’ She asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He’s been drinking all morning and has taken my car. He’s not insured. But he said he’d seen something.’

  Laura called her husband. It rang for a while and then Page answered sheepishly from the back of the police car.

  ‘Er, I’ve been arrested, love.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Putting a gun to a Sun photographer’s head.’

  When Page got to Grays police station, where his police career had started, the custody sergeant told him he had to take a breathalyser. But Page came up with a ruse. He said he had impacted wisdom teeth, which was true, and that they had affected his glands, which meant he couldn’t swallow or blow properly, which was a lie. Page knew it would take a few hours to get a doctor to take blood by which time he could vigorously exercise to sweat the alcohol out of his system. The police accepted his explanation and called a doctor.

  As he had been arrested for a serious firearms offence, Page was put into a paper jump suit while his clothes were bagged for forensic examination. He refused the plimsolls and stayed in his socks. He asked for regular cups of water for his sore throat, which he downed after press-ups and shadow boxing in his cell. By the time his blood was taken he was very tired.

  Laura panicked when she realized that there were very convincing imitation weapons in the house, including a rifle that her husband had bought for £1000. A friend was persuaded to come and take the weapon away under her coat.

  At 8.15 pm, Essex Police arrived to carry out a search of the house. Laura, Pat and the boys were all in the sitting room watching TV when the officers walked in. Page had given them the front-door key.

  ‘What’s this, James Bond?’ Pat asked.

  Laura was taken aback when one of the officers asked her directly, ‘Where are the guns?’

  ‘What guns?’

  ‘Your husband has told us exactly where they are Mrs Page.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘So where are they?’

  ‘Oh! That gun. I’ve taken it to a friend’s house.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I told her to look after it.’

  ‘Well you’d better get it back.’

  Laura collected the imitation gun and handed it to the officer, who had already started searching the house. Every time they found something she heard an expression of excitement over the police radios. In the conservatory they found some black imitation guns and one magazine. But it was the garage that did for Page. Officers found his police issue equipment belt complete with CS gas canister, a prohibited weapon under the Firearms Act.

  £ £ £

  Page was not the only person sweating on 21 November. When the DPS was alerted to his arrest another Gold Group meeting was hurriedly convened at Scotland Yard. This time the press bureau was also present to deal with the article that the Sun was preparing for tomorrow’s edition.

  Detective Inspector Orchard gave the Gold group an update on his team’s inquiries. He described ULPD as ‘a pyramid-style scheme’ and said his investigation was trying to identify the other police officers involved and whether they were creditors and potential victims of crime. Detective Superintendent McTigue reported back that her inquiries into ‘the kidnap threat’ were also ongoing.

  Discussion then turned to media management. Two senior Met press officers explained that press ‘lines’ had been agreed between the Met and Essex Police about what would be given to the media about the Lakeside incident.

  One of the press officers was told to speak to the Sun journalist putting the story together and find out how bad it was going to look for the Met. The press officer was also told to ‘emphasize that Page is on a career break’. This was pure spin to put distance between Page, the Met and the Palace.

  The problem for the Met was that Page was still a serving
police officer who had been allowed to remain on special unpaid leave since February 2004 while warnings about his spiralling conduct and the need for welfare had been ignored.65

  SO14 Commander Steve Grainger informed the meeting that until last week’s Gold meeting ‘there had been no contact with Page’. In other words, the media could discover that for two years Page had been able to spiral out of control, obtain millions by deception and endanger public life through his own gun-toting actions, and those of investors plotting his kidnap or worse.

  The meeting was informed that ‘[Page] has been offered the opportunity to resign which he has declined’. This was not something the Met was rushing to tell the media. It was decided that legal advice was urgently needed on whether he could be disciplined if he was on a career break.

  ‘And what are we doing about informing Her Majesty?’ the meeting was asked.

  ‘Did PC Page have access to the Royal Family? It’s something the media might want to know,’ a Met press officer added.

  That horse had long bolted and the DPS was already getting an alarming picture of brown envelopes coming into Buckingham Palace. Nevertheless, it was decided that a press officer would brief the Queen’s spokesperson. Commander Grainger of SO14 had already told her protection officer, senior members of the Royal Household and the Home Office. No doubt she was not amused.

  Grainger was supposed to visit Page in his cell that evening, but SO14 Superintendent Sean Walters called instead to inform him that Purple One had been made aware of his antics.

  ‘You’ve fucking stitched me up and I’m going to the press to spill the beans,’ Page spat back.

  ‘We are not on a secure line, PC Page. Going to the media would only make things worse for you,’ Walters replied.

  The next morning, the Sun front page gave a flick of their exclusive, which dominated page four. The headline screamed ‘RAGING COP HOLDS GUN TO A SUN MAN’S HEAD’ and the strapline read ‘Royal PC drags snapper from car. Probe over £1m he took from pals’. There was a demonic-looking picture of Page that Scott Hornby had snatched before the chase.